Before the pandemic, roughly 30% of the part-time workforce was working remotely. It is estimated this will expand to at least 48% post-pandemic. Until the pandemic is over, it’s unclear exactly how much of the full-time workforce that can work remotely, will continue to do so.

However, the reality for managers is that they are facing a greater need to prioritize cloud-based systems for:

• collaboration tools.
• employee evaluations.
• performance management.

It also means employees may find themselves in more important strategic roles than they were pre-pandemic. Which is due to the rise in the need for structured autonomy as a result of remote working (source).

These reasons are why task management software has become even more important than it already was. With task management software you can:

• plan ahead and break down ideas into actionable tasks
• track project status
• outsource work to an external team.
• setup specific roles and permissions.
• share and delegate teamwork in real time.
• setup recurring tasks and reminders

How task management software improves productivity

With data from May 2020, it looks like the at-home workforce is not only here to stay, but here to change how many businesses approach their day-to-day management and implementation of tasks.

While many businesses will attempt to return to office work, the number of outsourcing and work-from-home staff won’t return completely to pre-pandemic numbers.

The gig economy and the rise of outsourcing

With the rise of the gig economy, more and more businesses are hiring freelancers who offer project-based work, or who will work on a retainer. With there being no sign of this slowing down, it’s become important for project managers to be able to quickly and efficiently keep tabs on all aspects of the projects in their portfolio.

Industries such as digital marketing, finance, product management, event management, IT, and manufacturing are the ones which need task management software the most. As these are the industries which currently rely heavily on task-orientated projects for their venue. And outside of retail, hospitality, and tourism are some of the hardest hit by the pandemic.

Many of these industries have already had to adjust to an at-home work force to navigate through the pandemic. However, in many cases it’s been a ‘by the seat of your pants’ operation, which is hardly sustainable. Task management software has a range of benefits to sustainably improve productivity now and into the post-pandemic future.

How task management software can help your business be more productive

Here are four ways task management software can help your staff be more productive, and so improve your profits:

1. Easier task prioritization

Prioritizing tasks is an important part of being able to meet deadlines. When a team doesn’t know which tasks need to be done first, it becomes difficult to manage them on time. Essentially, when staff start work, they can get stuck on low priority tasks which drain time away from important tasks.

With task management software you can overcome any prioritization problems or issues by establishing lists and sublists to ensure the right tasks are being focused on. This streamlines staff time and ensures work is done in a timely fashion.

2. Keep track across all tasks

Manually tracking tasks burns a lot of time for management staff, especially where they have to check their team’s work individually if there’s a problem. With a task management software, you can view all the tasks on any given project on one screen.

You can see the whole project, and quickly check notes and comments of every staff member to identify what is going on, and where the tasks and projects are at.

3. Central hub to manage everything from

Whether you’re working on a single project or many projects, it’s necessary to maintain everything essential about the project close to hand. With task management software, you can keep everything together from notes and calendars, to tickets and cards, and much more.

With the right management software, you can save all activities your team performs while working so they won’t have to memorize things. It also makes it simpler for the whole team to stay on track and on top of their tasks.

If you want to avoid losing any sensitive information, important tasks or deadlines, tasks management apps can help you. Software like Quire, will not only help you save time, it will also help to digitize your whole process making your data more accessible, easy to track and easy to manage.

4. Productivity booster

To boost productivity is simple: spend more time working on tasks, and less time finding the tasks to work on. Sounds simple right? But too often in organizations, a project is not planned out correctly and teams are expected to figure out what, how, and by when they are supposed to complete tasks.

This is really the job of a project manager. And while it is necessary for a project meeting to happen prior to the commencement of work, there should be a clear direction for each team—if not for each team member.

To avoid staff spending a lot of time finding tasks, and there being no real guarantee they find the most important task, management software can help. With project lists and sublists, as well as an easy search function, staff can find their tasks quickly. They can also decide which tasks are the priorities, and which ones can be left until the end.

All the staff have to do now is plan out their time to ensure they complete the tasks, and then start work.

Read more on how to improve time management skills for project managers.

Why is this especially important for remote workers?

For staff working remotely, clear direction is vital to their success, and the success of any given project being worked on. Communication is an important part of successfully managing a team and completing a project. This becomes emphasized when the team is no longer in the same office as you.

Instead of having video conference calls, or phone calls every 5 minutes with different staff checking up on them, a centralized hub where you can check all projects, and all team member’s tasks just makes sense.

It means the project manager isn’t spending their days doing nothing but auditing and cross-checking. They can do the whole thing quickly and painlessly, allowing them to work on new projects, liaise with clients, or any other sort of work which can help bottom-line revenue.

Remote workers will feel more effective working in a centralized hub, where they can quickly communicate with team members and project managers. It also makes them more accountable, and easier to track just how much work they’re getting down and how quickly it’s being done.

At the end of the day, this is why businesses want task management software: it is an efficient and cost-effective way of improving productivity and increasing your revenue by ensuring all projects are completed to the letter and on time.

Online businesses in the post-pandemic world

Businesses that did not want staff to work remotely because of either trust issues or infrastructure issues, have had to make some hard choices. For some, it was implementing the necessary infrastructure to be able to work from home. For other business owners, it was taking a hard look at their staff and deciding whether to trust them and keep making money, or shut the business down until they could operate as normal.

Every online business that could have its staff work remotely did. Because otherwise it would have spelt financial ruin for them. So, they had to trust staff, and they had to implement infrastructure to support a remote team.

Now, with over three months of data at analysts’ disposal, it looks like the number of people working from home will only decrease slightly in the post-pandemic world. This is for a number of reasons: but the key ones seem to be that many employees have stated they feel happier and more productive at home.

Because of the way work has to be tracked with remote workers, managers can more easily see who’s doing what, and how long they are doing it for.

The advantages of cloud-based services to online businesses

When we get to the post-pandemic world, online businesses will see that with a task management system, and other cloud-based services are cheaper to operate, easier to scale, easier to manage, and better for productivity and profitability.

How Quire can help your business

If you are looking for a task management software to help you manage, maintain and keep track of multiple projects for an internal and external team, Quire is ideal.

Quire is a real-time collaborative project management tool to help businesses with their end-to-end project management needs. From task allocation and communication, to keeping tabs on a projects process, there’s not many project management needs our cloud-based software can’t help with.

If you would like to see for yourself, just what a task management software can do for you, feel free to sign up and get started for free. Or, feel free to contact our team for more information.